The Reef has been called Wharton's most Jamesian novel. The basic situation is the kind that Henry James had developed in many of his novels from The Portrait of a Lady (1881) through The Golden Bowl (1904). A woman becomes engaged to a man, only to find herself in a more complicated situation than she had ever anticipated because of his ties to an earlier relationship. The careful attention to point of view and the use of scene painting to suggest several levels of meaning are two particularly Jamesian techniques that Wharton uses throughout the novel.